the big one

I think the thing that people fear so much about California natural disasters is that they are so immediate. There is no warning for when “the Big One” is coming. You can wake up to your entire neighborhood on fire, have to leave all of your belongings behind in an instant.

Maybe it’s because I’ve lived so long with the anticipation of that, that that doesn’t scare me anymore.

It’s anticipation itself that scares me. On the Gulf Coast you can wait for a week wondering all the while how big the hurricane will actually be once it gets to you. You have to choose whether you think you’re safe and can stay at home, maybe strengthen whatever fortifications you have, in the hope that your house will be okay, or you can leave immediately, take only the essentials, and leave it up to chance whether it’ll all be swept away.

In the Midwest, you can watch the tornado approach from your porch, see it coming from miles away; as soon as the sirens start blaring you stand outside to see if you can spot it, and maybe then you close all the doors and huddle into the bathtub and wait and see if the whims of the wind bring the twister to you, or if it’ll mercifully pass you by.

If a fire breaks out, you grab what you can and you get out. Maybe you know this is a possibility so your files are all in one place and you’ve got some food and water in the car. Maybe you don’t, but if you keep driving you’ll eventually find somewhere that’s not on fire. The flames never stretch that far all at once.

If an earthquake hits, it’s over almost immediately—then maybe the aftershocks come, but by then you’ve already grabbed what you can and taken off. If you’re near enough to the coast to worry about the waves, you probably reckoned with that when you moved there; you know it’s a possibility, but your warning is so minuscule that it doesn’t really matter one way or another. And when you’re leaving, you know what’s important—you know to grab your pets, and some food and clothing, and there’s enough time in between whatever just hit and the next one to collect something. Enough.

And if your house is already on fire, if the quake forced you to alight immediately, then there was probably no chance of finding the things you needed anyway. 

I find comfort in the immediacy of it. There’s no time for decisions, no wrestling with the hard questions—what to take and what to leave. 

There’s only surviving, with whatever you have.